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Gary, Gary, Gary, Fight, Fight, Fight

Friday, 9 October 2009

Does anyone else share my flexible relationship with reality when it comes to celebrities, particularly chefs on the telly? Perhaps because I spend more time reading cook books than is healthy for someone of my overactive imagination, I really believe that I know them all personally. I used to go to cocktail parties on Oxford lawns with Nigella, both trussed up in jade taffeta. Rachel Allen and I had sleepovers and hung round stables together. John Torode nicked my dinner money and told everyone when I got my first bra. And I think everyone I know imagines giving Gary Rhodes a good shoeing behind the cricket pavillion.

However, on a day like this when the wind and glowering skies dictate my menu, it's to lovely Mr Slater I will turn. He'll whisk round my kitchen making this and this, while I sit nursing one of these. We'll have a good laugh about the excruciating algebra class we took; he'll tousle his godson's head and over a bottle of this will admire how elegantly I have adapted to life here in Bonkers-on-Sea, reminding me of London's bomb threats, knife fights and puke-spattered pavements. And Hatchards, cocktails at Claridges and 24-hour falafel.

Anyway, tomorrow I am going to dinner at a new mummy's house. Points for being overheard saying "god, I need a drink NOW". Double points because it was 10.30am. Perhaps there'll be puke on her pavement.

Ten Tales Told: A Century of Peculiarly British Short Stories [Kindle Edition]

An eclectic, eccentric collection of ten stories, each set in a different decade, spanning the last century. Rich in colour and character, the stories examine betrayal of and by women in all its subtle forms.